Deva hated stepping away from Aleksei for so long, but she didn’t have any choice but to go herself to the three different drugstores Sasha had instructed in her email. Adding in two other stops at hardware stores for other supplies on her list, and she had been gone for almost three hours.
The sun had set, and Deva was glad to be back in the cool temperature of Aleksei’s condo. Not that she wasn’t used to heat, Texas could be extremely hot, but somehow her body didn’t remember the torture of Chicago’s humidity. Wiping her forehead as she let out a sigh of relief, she returned to the task at hand. First was to sort out the various medications and drugs Sasha had prescribed, the dosage and order to be administered, neatly lined up on the kitchen counter.
Time for the treatment to start. Peeking in his bedroom, Deva felt bad for waking Aleksei up. For the treatment to work, there was no time to lose. He appeared so peaceful. It was tempting to let him sleep some more. The Aleksei she saw appeared almost harmless. But she wasn’t a fool. What spurred her into action was how she noticed that some of the bruises on his cheek and shoulder had spread. Time for turning his life into hell.
Gently, she woke Aleksei up for the first round of medicine and let him go back to sleep for an hour. It gave her the time to prepare an ice bath. Deva had bought enough bags of ice to fill half the bath.
Just as the hour was up, she woke up the poor man again and helped him to the bathroom. Deva forced herself to ignore his nakedness, after all, there was nothing there she hadn’t already seen. Or touched. When he arrived in the bathroom, and the tub filled with ice, he seemed to brace himself, and climbed in. Once he was settled, Deva returned to his room to set up his bed with the two queen-size electric blankets she had bought. Making a quick detour by the kitchen, she grabbed one of the one-liter bottles she had prepared and returned to the bathroom.
Aleksei was immersed in the ice bath, leaning back with only his head above the frigid water and bobbing ice cubes. She could see how tense he was, fighting the cold, his jaw tight and lips in a thin line. Deva had set up the timer and would stick to the program, even if it meant sitting on him in the icy water.
Unscrewing the bottle, she handed it to him. “Drink.”
He looked at her for a minute and took the bottle in his hand. As she expected, the man grimaced at the first sip. “Are you sure you know what you are doing?”
“You mean treating an underground fighter in so little time so he can get hurt even more when he jumps back in the cage, with the ultimate outcome that he leaves it alive? Sadly, yes. Drink. All of it.”
Aleksei’s glare turned questioning, but he complied and gulped the mixture as she checked her timer. It took some time, but he completely drank the bottle. Leaning back once more, Aleksei was shivering badly when finally, the timer beeped.
Still silent, she grabbed a towel as he stumbled to an unstable standing position, his body shivering uncontrollably. Clinging as best she could to his cold skin, she rubbed him off quickly before helping him back to his bedroom.
Lips almost blue, his body jerking, Aleksei slid between the steaming hot blankets with a sound close to a whimper coming from deep in his chest. Going back in the kitchen, she grabbed another bottle and a small pile of sorted pills.
Color had returned to his face, and he wasn’t shivering anymore. On the contrary, his face had a sheen of sweat, and his cheekbones were turning pink. “It’s too hot. You have to turn it down.”
Deva stood beside him and grabbed the electric blanket before he could push it away from his body. “Not until the timer beeps, Aleksei. You follow the drill to get better, or I walk out, and you live with the pain.”
Annoyance had returned to his eyes, which was better than glassy indifference, or numbing pain.
His body relaxed, but the slight sheen of sweat started pouring from his face. Deva encouraged him to take the pills and drink before making her way back to the kitchen once more. She grabbed a tube of medicated lotion, bandages and her massage oil and returned to the bedroom.
She started by applying ointment on his knuckles before bandaging them. Many of the scratches she had seen over his body didn’t require her intervention. When the timer beeped, she pulled the blankets completely off the bed. His exhaled sigh almost made her smile. “Can you roll to the other side of the bed, face down.”
He complied with slow difficulty, and she switched the blankets off. Rounding the bed, she squeezed a good amount of ointment and mixed it up with the oils before warming it in her hands. For his benefit, her first touch was very gentle. Slowly, she started by spreading the oil over his skin in a light, circular motion. No pressure yet. Maybe tomorrow, if his body reacted well to the medication. Once satisfied, she made him turn on his back and repeated the treatment. Even in its battered state, his body reacted to her touch as it had a few days before, but she ignored his swollen cock. Too bad her treacherous body didn’t.
Working on his calf, then his thigh, covering his bruised ribs and tense shoulders, she was finishing his second arm when finally, he spoke. “Why are you doing this? What’s in it for you?”
Deva didn’t stop at his question, didn’t even look at him. “Does there have to be a reason? Never heard of compassion for the suffering souls?”
Aleksei seemed to assess her question but then shook his head. “No, that doesn’t exist. It only hides something else. Profit, greed, opportunism...”
She put his arm on the bed and covered his body with a thin cotton sheet. The fever still a hold, so she added a blanket.
“You better sleep, the next round will come soon enough.”
“Deva. Tell me. Please, solnyshka.”
His voice was so soft, so unlike the man she had first encountered. And in his eyes, she only saw a sincere plea. Turning from the door, she wasn’t sure how to answer. “I don’t need what you have, your money or connections. Let’s just say that you remind me of someone who was once in the same situation. I helped him then, as I’m helping you now. Sleep.”
Without waiting for his answer, Deva turned the light off and closed the door.
She had no intention of revisiting ghosts from her past tonight and decided that sleeping would do her more good than reminiscing on what-might-have-been until the second round of treatment started.
Resetting the timer on her phone, she lay down on the oversized couch and prayed for sleep to take her before the memories did.